All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy is a well-known proverb but when it comes to climbing the career ladder, people often tend to neglect their hobbies and their passions. During my interviews for MBA admissions, one question popped up quite frequently, “What is your hobby and how has it helped you?” Not only during MBA interviews, but during my placements too. This is a way of judging whether a person is able to enjoy their lives while also learning life skills from it.
My hobby was a very simple one — cooking. For the longest time I wondered what skills am I learning from it that I can talk about? Its not as easy as cricket where I can say I learnt team spirit. It seemed like I had chosen the wrong hobby, almost everyone cooks in Indian household and no, its not something niche. However, when I started to pay more attention, I began realising how this very mundane activity is teaching me so much. I have listed down a few learnings:
Experimentation
When I say cooking, its not the regular dal roti, I rarely enjoy that. What I enjoy more is discovering new cuisines and adapting them to my taste buds. I try different dishes ranging from hummus to vegan steaks, from chickpea pasta to galouti kebab. Sometimes the end result is a total failure, sometimes I can’t believe my own fingers to have produced such a good dish. I’m learning how to be open to different cuisines that I may have never tried, how to be open to experimentation and enjoy it.
Innovation
Findings show that a safe environment not only promotes a better atmosphere but also increases the capacity for learning, experimentation, and innovation. Kitchen is my safe space, I mix and match random ingredients just to create a new salad. The recipe may never have a name but I love eating new flavours blended together. Cooking has shown me what an adrenaline rush can an innovation give.
Accepting failure
As I mentioned earlier, not every dish that I try is a success. Some dishes go straight to the bin after hours of preparation and cooking. Apart from developing creativity, cooking develops learning agility, structures our thought process and helps us learn how mistakes can actually help us learn.
Mathematical thinking
Even when you are following a recipe, you tend to make alterations to make sure it fits your style and taste buds. This means altering the proportions of your ingredients. In my opinion, cooking is the best way to adapt this mathematical way of thinking in day-to-day work. It helps us estimate the resources we will be needing in the future and to what extent will we be utilising them. Project management 101!
Taking advantage of all the available resources
With the large number of channels; YouTube, food blogs, random google searches, there are always so many variants of the same dish. Cooking has opened my mind on how to make the best use of all, mix and match based on your goal. Lets map this to a professional scenario, a client has asked for a deliverable (Read: a dish), you go through various resources like case studies, past experiences etc (Read: YouTube tutorials, food blogs etc). Then you make a mental note of all the things that you will use from different resources to give the client the best (Read: mixing ingredients and preparatory methods from different resources to make the desired dish of your taste).
Frugality
One of Amazon’s 14 leadership principles, frugality is an important skill. It means accomplishing more with less. We’ve all been in a situation where we have less of too many things in the fridge. How to use them all and create a tasty dish? Often times it has happened that I’ve had a lack of a particular ingredient and have had to substitute with another. Well that’s frugality life lesson right there in your fridge!
All hobbies, daily activities, no matter how small, teach you something. It is on the individual to learn from the small things and apply them in their workspaces.
